Modern consumer electronics particularly personal portable devices, such as cellular phones, digital cameras, and music players, require miniaturization as well as increasing integrated circuit die content to fit an ever shrinking physical space. Numerous technologies have been developed to meet these requirements. One of these technologies involves making the integrated circuit die content as thin as possible.
Integrated circuit wafers are fabricated to be as thin as possible through processes such as thinning, grinding, or lapping. These processes are applied to the wafers after fabricating the wafer including forming electrical interconnect, such as solder bumps, on the wafer. The ultra thin wafers are prone to bowing, warping, cracking or breaking due to many factors including the thinness of the wafers.
Furthermore, protecting the wafer from deformation and damage can also create problems. One such problem is protecting electrical interconnect during thinning. To date, the protective materials cause detachment or damage of the electrical interconnect, particularly when the protective materials are removed after thinning.
Electrical interconnects are critical for the next level of integration of the integrated circuit die, such as a packaging, substrate attachment or printed circuit board mounting. Detection can be costly and difficult. As such, detachment and damage of electrical interconnect often result in scrap during fabrication through the integration into the end consumer electronics product.
Consequently, numerous approaches have been attempted to solve wafer deformation and damage. Some of these approaches require additional physical structures on the active side or back side of the wafer. Although these structures alleviate deformation and damage, they often cause deformation or damage to the wafer surface as well as electrical interconnect attached or formed on the wafer surface.
Thus, a need still remains for a method to control deformation and damage in processing ultra thin wafers. In view of the ever-increasing need to save costs and improve efficiencies, it is more and more critical that answers be found to these problems.
Solutions to these problems have been long sought but prior developments have not taught or suggested any solutions and, thus, solutions to these problems have long eluded those skilled in the art.